Abstract
Research on Brazilian music, whether by Brazilian or
foreign scholars, has been dominated by the combined mystiques of
tri-racial ethnicity and progressive nationalization. While at "the
center" ethnography has been primarily drawn upon as a means of
illustrating particular theoretical perspectives, in Brazil it is the
theoretical models that are fitted to the ethnography. The predictability
of the places at which Brazilian musicologists have looked in their quest
for musical otherness, however, is rendered evident by the presence of a
Japanese scholar's contribution.

In order to
expand British Journal of Ethnomusicology and enhance its
international profile, the editorial board has taken the decision to
publish, annually, one issue devoted to a specific theme, to be followed
by a second one of a more general nature. Brazilian Musics, Brazilian
Identities is the first of such thematic issues.

As Suzel Ana Reily
and Martin Clayton state in the Editorial, "each article focuses upon a
particular musical universe, looking at how it articulates with the
construction of identities within a specific sector of Brazilian society."
Geography, however, is not the primary preoccupation: the issue has been
conceived as illustrative of how recent debates on the musical
construction of identity within ethnomusicology are informing research in
a specific national context. In Reily's and Clayton's view, while most
ethnomusicologists know very little about the work of Brazilian
musicologists, these, on the contrary, "are very much aware of the latest
academic trends emerging at the center." And, "as the center moves
progressively toward an academic style in which ethnography is drawn upon
primarily as a means of illustrating a particular theoretical perspective,
in Brazil … it is the theoretical models that are fitted to the
ethnography." Herein, they believe, lies the interest of the Brazilian
contribution. Reily holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the
University of São Paulo (USP) and is Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology
and Social Anthropology at the Queen's University of Belfast.

As Reily
states in "Introduction: Brazilian Musics, Brazilian Identities" (pp
1-10), although musical accounts by missionaries, travelers and local
residents date back to colonial times, conscious investigation of
Brazilian music by Brazilian scholars is a relatively recent phenomenon
that was instigated by the emergence of nationalist sentiments and started
taking shape with the work of Mário de Andrade (1893-1945). To give
readers a clearer idea of how the contributions in her volume relate to
ongoing debates in Brazilian intellectual circles, she provides an
overview of musical research in Brazil. Stressing "the myth of tri-racial
ethnicity," according to which Brazilian music would be "the loving flower
of three sad races" (namely Amerindians, Africans and the Portuguese, as
evoked in the final verse of the Parnassian poet Olavo Bilac's "Música
brasileira"),[1] she makes an
important point:

In
a manner analogous to that noted by João Hernesto Weber[2]
in relation to Brazilian literary historiography, the authors of histories
of Brazilian music have frequently projected their own nationalist
preoccupation into the past, and their narratives represent the past as a
continuous and inevitable process, in which the music produced in Brazil
is progressively nationalized. This process of nationalization has been
represented through a chronological succession of styles, which came to
acquire canonical status, defining what constitutes "authentic" Brazilian
national music.[3]

The extent
to which the combined mystiques of tri-racial ethnicity and progressive
nationalization hold sway may be inferred from the fact that Reily "had
intended to invite a Brazilian scholar to write on the musical activities
of one of the major immigrant groups in the country, but there was no one
conducting such research."

"Música
Romântica"[romantic music] in Montes Claros: Inter-Gender Relations in
Brazilian Popular Song" (pp 11-40), by Martha Tupinambá de Ulhôa, from the
University of Rio de Janeiro (Uni-Rio), unfolds in two sections. In the
first, Ulhôa draws the reader's attention to the history of social life in
Montes Claros, from its origins as a center where, in the late 18th
century, the rural aristocracy would come to attend the monthly mass, to
the mid 1960s, when, under the military dictatorship, "young people began
to gather at bars and pizzerias."

In the second section, she analyzes three examples of romantic song that
were likely heard in Montes Claros in the last hundred years: "Amo-te muito"[4],
by João Chaves (Audio 1), "Vingança", by Lupicínio Rodrigues, in Linda
Batista's 1951 interpretation (Audio 2), and "Detalhes", by Roberto Carlos and Erasmo
Carlos, in Roberto Carlos's 1971 interpretation (Audio
3). Each section tackles a
different object (social life in Montes Claros and a set of songs) according to a
different method (ethnography and semiotic analysis of song lyrics). What connects
them is the focus they share on inter-gender relations and the diachronic nature
of Ulhôa's approach.

In "Gaucho
Musical Regionalism" (pp 41-60), Maria Elizabeth Lucas, from the Federal
University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), shows how, in the bosom of one of
the areas in the country where income is best distributed, the stigma of
coarseness has been raised to the status of a regional emblem. Focusing on
the ways in which her case-study responds "to the conditions brought about
by transnational capitalism," Lucas describes the roots of gaucho identity
and its enactment in nativist music festivals, where between two and
fifteen thousand white middle-class urbanites gather within a two to four
day festive frame, eager to cultivate rural traditions by displaying
markers of "gaúcho-ness." Male gaucho identity, of which it is a
question here, is stereotypical to the point of being perceived as caricatural even in the context of the highly polarized Brazilian gender
system. Gender issues, however, are not on Lucas's agenda.

Fig. 1 Poster for the First Festival of Northeastern Cantadores de Viola (impromptu
singers accompanying themselves on a guitar-like instrument), in 1983. Woodcut by Dila

Fig. 2 Poster of
the Ninth National Congress of Repentista (duelling) Poets, in 1986.
Unsigned woodcut.

Translated
by Reily, "Ethics in the Sung Duels of North-Eastern Brazil: Collective
Memory and Contemporary Practice" (pp 61-94), by Elizabeth Travassos, from
the University of Rio de Janeiro (Uni-Rio), provides descriptions of sung
poetic competitions in which two singers play guitar-like instruments and
attempt to outdo one another in the art of verse improvisation. For
Travassos, the vitality of this tradition is closely linked to the ethics
that structure its performance. "On entering the performance arena, they
(viz. the singers) must strive to suspend their everyday social
identities, neutralizing these attributes to engage with one another as
poets, that is, as 'equals'." In other words, "the real advantages that
the rich have over the poor, whites over blacks, the educated over the
illiterate, men over women can be reversed through talent in the art of
verse improvisation." Combining vivid description of performances and
characters with insightful observation, unhindered by extraneous
constructs, Travassos puts together a beautiful piece of writing, one in
which the question of identities starts making way for the perhaps more
pressing question of Brazilian subjectivities.

In "Singing
Contests in the Ethnic Enclosure of the Post-War Japanese-Brazilian
Community" (pp 95-118), Shuhei Hosokawa examines the historical
development and social organization of the amateur singing contests known
as nodojiman among Japanese-Brazilians, looking at how they
contributed to the forging of Japanese-Brazilian identity in the post-war
era, precisely the time at which Japanese immigrants realized that their
residence in Brazil would be permanent. As Hosokawa notes, "the Japanese
immigrant strategy of maintaining ethnic unity evinced within the context
of song contests stood in direct contrast with the discourses in the wider
Brazilian society, where miscegenation articulated the very essence of
national identity." Hardly known amid local musicological circles,
Hosokawa is Associate Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology,
where he teaches theory and history of popular music and culture. His
publications include a co-edited book in English (with Toru Mitsui), Karaoke Around the World: Global Technology, Local Singing (London:
Routledge, 1998) and several books in Japanese, among which A Social
History of Film in the Japanese-Brazilian Community (1999), Samba
in the Country of Enka (1995) and The Aesthetics of Recorded Sound
(1990), as well as articles in Cultural Studies, Popular Music, Perfect Beat and
Japanese Studies.

Fig. 3. A sample of Paschoal's eccentric orchestration: an excerpt
from his "Cores," for cicada, two pianos, bells and whistles.

Translated by Reily, "The
Experimental Music of Hermeto Paschoal e Grupo (1981-93): A Musical System
in the Making" (pp 119-42), by Luiz Costa Lima Neto, from the Martins Pena
State School of Theatre, offers an insight into the "eccentric"
compositional techniques employed by Paschoal and his group in the making
of their "anti-commercial" music. The "authenticity" of Paschoal's
project, the author believes, "would be structured around eccentricity,
the (natural) sounds of everyday life and (non-commercial) virtuosity." A
digression into the spectro-morphology of noises, however, interrupts the
flow of Costa Lima's exposition with periclitating handling of
electroacoustic terminology. One is left wondering why the discussion of
Paschoal's use of iron rods as sound-producing objects has to happen with
reference to Jonathan Harvey's recording of the 33 inharmonic partials of
the great tenor bell of Winchester Cathedral as analysed by Fast Fourier
Transform for use in his 1980 IRCAM commission.[5]

The thematic section concludes with a review-essay
on Jean-Michel Beaudet's Souffles d'Amazonie: les orchestres tule des
Wayãpi (1997) by Rafael José de Menezes Bastos, from the Federal
University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), and Acácio Tadeu de Camargo Piedade,
from the State University of Santa Catarina (UDESC).

Ethnomusicology in Brazil has played a leading role
in the development of the musicological discipline, by and large dominated
by editions of so called baroque music, mythologizing narratives of "great
composers" lives, dutiful exegeses of the Nationalist/Modernist leitmotif
and purportedly emic approaches to the musics of aural tradition. Whether
the apparent contradiction between the reference frames of Ethnomusicology
and those--"eclectic and selectively pluralistic", as Agawu has put it[6]--of the New Musicology will
pose a threat to that leadership, it remains to be seen. A glance at the
programs of the Society for Ethnomusicology 2001 meeting and of the
British Forum for Ethnomusicology one-day conference at Royal Holloway the
same year shows that, in the Northern hemisphere, miscegenation is already
taking place. Would a methodological symbiosis be looming in the horizon
of antropofagismo?[7] Be
that as it may, the presence of Hosokawa's essay in Reily's volume
suffices to indicate the predictability of the places at which Brazilian
scholars have looked in their quest for musical otherness. The time seems
ripe for Brazilian musicologists to take stock of subjects, trajectories
and methodologies. To this end, Brazilian Musics, Brazilian Identities
is a generous and most valuable contribution.